As many of you know, I recently moved to Nashville. That move coincided with Peter Thiel’s 4-part lecture series on the Antichrist, hosted by my friends at the Nashville Pamphleteer and Meriwether Academy. I was able to attend the event on Monday, and so did so, despite being somewhat skeptical of the subject—I’ve long agreed with the Virginia gentry of old that “a gentleman should hold his religion like his liquor”: imbibe a great deal of it, but never be overwhelmed by it, particularly in public.
It was an interesting talk, though much of the theology went over my head. Thiel was an engaging speaker, and I enjoyed getting to meet a number of like-minded gentlemen after the event. If you are reading this, it was wonderful meeting you.
There was one aspect of the argument Thiel made in this lecture—Part III, covering “the Velocity of the Antichrist”—that I found particularly interesting: according to 2 Thessalonians 2, the Katechon is the “restrainer”—the power holding back the manifestation of the Antichrist—and Thiel indicated he thought the “great fortunes” have a role to play in being that Katechon. He also framed the force that must be fought as globalism. The ICC, USAID, the SWIFT banking system, and so on. I think he is right, though it is “great houses” of the sort my friends Johann Kurtz, Ben Black, and Gregory Treat describe that could fill that role, not rich “tech bros” in Silicon Valley. I’ll explain why here, after briefly explaining Thiel’s general argument.
NOTE: Yes, this is not an installment of the Harry Byrd series. I thought y’all might want a break, and I am giving a speech at a men’s group event this weekend (more on that soon), so writing another ~10,000-word essay with 20 or so lengthy footnotes was a bit beyond my capacity. More importantly, I think this is more a bridge rather than an interruption: the next two articles in the Harry Byrd series will cover his fight with Truman’s attempts to make America a globalist power, and then his standing athwart history in a decade-long attempt to reject the Civil Rights Act and trend towards levelling egalitarianism. He could only do so because he built a “Great House” in the truest sense of the term. Further, we need such men today if we are to fight what Thiel describes, whether it be “just” globalist tyranny or the Antichrist. So, I think this essay will help show why the next installments in the Byrd series are so important. Read Part I: The Organization and Part II: War with FDR if you have not already.
Thiel’s Antichrist
Basing his talk on a host of theologians and professors—including René Girard (under whom he studied at Stanford), Cardinal John Henry Newman, Pope Benedict, Carl Schmitt, and a host of European authors with names I couldn’t pronounce and can’t remember—Thiel argued that the biblical Antichrist could, and perhaps will, present itself in our age through globalism, technocracy, and bureaucracy. He thinks that one last great man of history could master a system built not just to constrain such men, but in the belief that they no longer exist, and use it to establish the sort of one world government prophesied in Revelation.
In his view, the Antichrist will appear not as a cartoonishly evil tyrant, but as the sort of person that people generally want in charge: a man who is highly competent, well credentialed, and frames himself as being a benevolent technocrat of sorts. Though such a man will be dangerous, few will recognize him as such, for his obvious characteristics will be managerial competence rather than deep and abiding evil.
Because people expect evil to look horrifying, they will fail to recognize an evil disguised as consummate managerial competence. Further, Thiel argues that such a man will appropriate the sort of empathy that Christians are taught is good, and use such arguments as calling for peace, asking for humanitarian relief, championing victims, and so on to justify the creation of a global government and surveillance state that enforces it.
This is the crux of Thiel’s argument about the Antichrist. "Peace and safety" will be the slogan of the Antichrist, and it will be brought about by a totalitarian state where mankind surrenders everything that made the West great— sovereignty, dynamism, and liberty—in exchange for “peace and safety”. North Korea, with French or Yookay welfare state characteristics. His view on this is supported by 1 Thessalonians 5:3, which provides, “While people are saying, ‘Peace and safety,’ destruction will come on them suddenly.”
Thiel thinks the Antichrist will use fear of Armageddon to create a monolithic, centralized, one-world government that is established to ensure Armageddon never happens. As he frames it, we in our decline are so fearful of sleepwalking into Armageddon that we will accept a unified, borderless, totalizing bureaucracy established and enforced by the last great man of history if doing so seems like the way to avoid catastrophe and achieve “peace and safety”.
In the talk I attended, Thiel, after briefly reviewing that, then noted that late modernity is a particularly fertile ground for such a situation not only because we deride and deny belief in great men of the sort Carlyle described in On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, but because our achievement of real technological advancement has slowed considerably. Further, what advancement has occurred has occurred largely in the realm of bits rather than atoms. Because of this, he argues, we have increasingly become an even more fearful civilization that lost its frontier spirit and encourages living lives of inward-focused, risk-averse frivolity.
I thought it was particularly poignant that he marked the point at which this change occurred as being in 1969, when Woodstock followed just months after Apollo: America soon gave up on Apollo, and fully embraced the spirit of the do-nothing hippies.
In any case, he went on to argue that this decrease in advancement has not just suppressed our spirit of greatness, but has allowed the tyrannical bureaucratic regime to catch up and build the sort of NGO-bureaucracy-supranational institution state that makes doing anything impossible. Supranational bodies, global regulatory agreements, international safety treaties, and centralized digital financial networks provide the architecture for a universal state, and need only be harnessed.
Right now, after all, they’re already dangerous enough. American leaders like Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio live in fear of the ICC, worried that they like Netanyahu might face an arrest warrant and face being sent off to one of its show trials if the right loses its grip on power. The SWIFT system can be used to stamp out dissent. Hiding money is nearly impossible, and assets can simply be taken in the name of “the people,” as Russia’s were. Europe is planning to confiscate “excess” savings to fight Russia, and might well do the same to fund the entitlement state even one hour longer. Such is what Britain did to create the NHS, after all. Doubtless, enforcing this is what those Chinese crowd control robots are for.
We saw this during Covid: the powers that be decided, whether out of fear of the flu or reasons related to the debt, to lock everyone in their homes and apartments for months and to shut down the economy. Those who didn’t comply were ruthlessly punished with fines, arrests, investigations, and the like. This happened all over the world, as if by agreement, in the blink of an eye. What enabled that was the network of institutions Thiel identified as being the root of globalist power and control.
Right now, that system is mostly fragmented and has been cobbled together over the years. Most of the pieces necessary for a world government and the tyranny it could bring are already in place—and, he noted, so is the ideology of safetyism enforced by tyranny that Europe in particular represents—but no single man wields it for any particular end as of yet. Perhaps it is just an egregore guiding them, but the pieces are all there for someone—the Antichrist, Thiel seems to think—to pick them up and use them to establish the dismal world tyranny he thinks “peace and safety” will justify.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever,” has become, “if you want a glimpse of the future, imagine Judge LaFonda—put through law school by MacKenzie Bezos’s ‘I Hate White Men 501(c)(3)’—enforcing Emmanuel Macron’s law forbidding hate speech and ordering the arrest of anyone in West Virginia who argued they ought not have to surrender 100% of their salary to fund braces for Gambian cannibals, forever,” and government AIs taking their paychecks anyway as drones strike them from the heavens if they try to resist.
A few pieces are still needed for it to be complete. For one, there is the Mark of the Beast—“no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark” (Revelation 13:17)—which Thiel seems to think will come about through even more totalizing financial surveillance, centralized digital currencies, and uniform regulatory oversight enforced around the globe. More importantly, someone must come about who can wield all of it at once to suffocate us forever.
In Thiel’s view, the only way to stave this off is through the Katechon—a real form of resistance to this globalist menace and he who might use it as a rainbow-covered sledgehammer. He seemed at a loss for what this might be, other than arguing that the Giving Pledge—billionaires promising to give most of their money to leftist NGOs—is ushering the Antichrist along rather than stopping him, and that were those fortunes made hereditary they might help be the Katechon that resists it.
I think he’s almost right, but less specific than he needs to be. Resistance to the spirit of the age, its institutions, and the man who might bridle it to dominate the world for the worse will not be accomplished through ethereal tech fortunes being passed from one generation to the next; that runs into the same problem of global surveillance and regulatory tyranny that it is impossible to resist that everything else does. But “Great Houses”—families that use wealth to build real power in the real world for generations—do present the Katechon opportunity.
The Great House Katechon
The Grizzled Earl and the War with Tyranny
In 1278, King Edward I was strapped for cash. Longshanks was a competent king, but also something of a tyrant. The very sort of man who would have conquered the world if he could, though he couldn’t. In any case, he needed money and decided that his nobles offered a sufficiently rich and tempting source from which to get it. So, he initiated “Quo Warranto”—“By what warrant?”—proceedings. Land holdings were, after all, tracked and regulated, and so he had his list of who owned what and was checking it twice as he sent his “justices” across England to demand nobles pay hefty fees to renew their charters. All for the good of the kingdom, you see.
Most decided the fight wasn’t worth it, and just gave into his rapacious demands for more gold with which to fight this or that war. Not a fellow named John de Warenne. As recounted by the medieval chronicler Walter of Guisborough, when the royal justices called upon John de Warenne to present his charter and pay a fee, he declined. Instead, the grizzled old earl, a veteran of many a campaign, drew his ancient sword, its blade notched from the countless fights he had won, and slammed that blade on the table.
As he did so, he declared, “My ancestors came with William the Bastard, and conquered their lands with the sword, and I will defend them with the sword against anyone wishing to seize them. The King did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forebears were sharers and partners with him.”
Stunningly, the domineering King Edward I backed down. Faced with this resistance from true nobles of Warenne’s mold, he let the old families live in peace and stopped trying to fleece them. The tyranny ended, for they were both able and willing to fight for their rights.
Such is, in large part, what limited the tyranny of medieval times. Yes, some kings were terrible tyrants. But only to a point, for the grizzled earl and his sort were unwilling to tolerate a centralized state that would attempt to expropriate their property, however much doing so might theoretically help the kingdom.
It’s Always the Great Houses
This sort of pattern has held true throughout history, in victory and defeat alike. It was Tiberius Gracchus—heir to a noble name—who stood as the last real bulwark against Rome becoming a land of cosmopolitan tyranny and plutocratic rapacity.
It was Bendor Grosvenor, descendant of a Norman knight, and Baron Willoughby de Broke, 19th of his name, who put together the Diehards, a collection of old lords who fought against the bureaucratic tyranny of Winston Churchill and Lloyd George. It was the Duke of Beaufort who led what postwar resistance there was to the Labour regime’s outright confiscation of assets in the name of the “good of the people”, and he thought Sir Winston should have been fed to the foxhounds for the tyranny and tax regime he heaped upon England.
In America, it was Harry Byrd who led the resistance to FDR’s attempts to fundamentally transform America. Rhodesia was the last holdout of excellence, the last outpost to which men who wanted something more than totalizing and stultifying equality fled; it was supported by Byrd as it, led not just by Rhodesian planter Ian Smith but African aristocrat PK van der Byl and British aristocrat the Duke of Montrose, stood alone in resisting egalitarian tyranny.
Some of these men were more successful than others. Sometimes the aristocratic counterrevolutions succeeded, as in Harry Byrd’s Virginia, Franco’s Spain, Mannerheim’s Finland, or the Holy Alliance1 crushing the French Revolution. Other times it failed, as with the Diehards, Tiberius Gracchus, and the French gentry and faithful Catholics leading a rebellion against the French Revolution in the Vendée.
But what is certain is that it was only one sort of man who fought against the all-enveloping bureaucratic tyranny without attempting to just impose a supranational tyranny of his own: the true aristocrat, the patriarch or scion of a Great House who cared and fought for his people. The plutocrat never did, and instead alternated between cowering in the face of tyranny and attempting to profit from it. The “fascist” generally attempted to establish a more bureaucratic and totalizing form of “Tory Democracy”, and the results were as dismal as could be expected. Liberal democracy encouraged communism around the world in the name of equality. Communism was, well, communism. Social democracy was just communism by other means. Decolonization was communism by other means.
Why Great Houses
So, the Great Houses (and those who supported them, from retainers to voters) alone stood against the origins of the system that Thiel described, that cobbled-together collection of NGOs, supranational organizations, stultifying social democracy, and all the rest. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they failed. But they alone stood as leaders in the face of “peace and safety” bureaucracy and technocracy, whatever its exact form. Why?
This goes back to the old earl. He was defined by confidence. He knew his capabilities, knew he could fight, and had tested himself before. More than that, as the old lord of an old estate, he knew that he had men on whom he could rely if he chose to fight. Men who were loyal to him, who knew him to be honorable, and who would thus answer the call and lay down their lives in defense of his rights and prerogatives as he would for theirs.
That was the benefit of the non-abstracted form of wealth that such men held, and it came up repeatedly. Because they were fixtures in a particular place for generation after generation, those who handled the role well were men who were trusted by those who relied on them to do the right and honorable thing. Because they were trusted to such an extent, they knew that their dependents would follow them, even into battle. That bred a confidence that often meant they could avoid battle. When they could not, as in the baron’s wars, they actually fought, and through that showed that they meant business.
These were not mercenary, purchased relationships built atop a pile of abstracted wealth. After all, as Thiel noted in his speech, a brokerage account can always just go to zero while the powers that be decide what to do with you. “Sorry about your Chevron stock, but you were racist. Now go to jail; you’ll have to use a public defender, as we will not unfreeze your money for you.” Such is the point of the opaque regulatory state composed of NGOs and bureaucracies that has been created: there is no one obvious to fight, no one at all to appeal to, and no real way to ensure compliance in a way that ensures it won’t be taken.
It is only real assets that are personally held, preferably for a very long time, and used as bases for resistance that avoid that problem. I have written about this before in the context of the Fitzwilliams, so I will not do so again here, nor will I repeat my Harry Byrd stories (though you should read my articles on the Fitzwilliams and Byrd, as they are relevant here). Instead, I’ll show this through the lens of the Grosvenor family, as they are one of the few aristocratic families in England that seem to have fully grasped this lesson in modernity.
The Grosvenors: Second Duke of Westminster
Take the Duke of Westminster that I mentioned earlier. He was hated by the British regulatory apparatus by the time he died in the 1950s. He was an old reactionary who detested the City of London and its denizens, had fought for and loved the old Empire, helped settle Rhodesia, had fought with Churchill over the Parliament Bill, and had helped lead the Tory resistance to getting involved in World War II. Uncoincidentally, he argued that the Gracchi were “true patriots” in the fight against the Roman plutocracy.2 He was also generally well-liked by the public and his tenants (if not his ex-wives), and immensely wealthy.
This made him and his estate a plum target for the socialist government, and the Inland Revenue Service stood up an entire new division to strip his family’s ancient lands, urban real estate, business interests, and other holdings from his estate upon his death. In confiscating his assets in the name of the people and world peace, it would prove a point about the nature of power in modern Britain: the days of the dukes were past, and the days of bureaucrats were upon Albion.
But then a strange thing happened: the state couldn’t get its claws on the estate. Every avenue to do so was blocked, for someone had read the rules and figured out how to beat them. You see, Bendor, though a rake, was also quite bright and generally realistic about things, and he and his retainers did not eschew the subject of his death but rather had planned on it for a long time. So, when it finally came in his old age, they were ready to do battle with the tax regime. Describing the preparation for battle in his Aristocrats, and how the nature of who Bendor was meant he had family retainers on whom he could rely, author Robert Lacey writes:
But family retainers, whatever their other shortcomings, are loyal. They derive something of their masters’ satisfaction from serving a cause greater than the here and now. They see themselves as part of the family, setting their endeavours in the same time-defeating family context which stretches back into the past and forward into the future. They defend the family interests as if they were their own, and it was in this spirit that George Ridley prepared to do battle to save the Grosvenor inheritance from the hands of the Inland Revenue in 1947.
Ridley did so by eschewing financialized, abstracted forms of wealth. These are excellent targets for tax regimes, for they have an obvious value and are easy to seize. There’s no haggling, no real way of fighting for them. $4 million of stock is $4 million of stock, and 90% death taxes mean it’s really $400,000 of stock. That’s unideal.
But what is a (temporarily) unprofitable port in a forgotten city worth? Anything? Nothing? What about a forest full of oak trees that might not be harvest-ready for 75 years? A farm that requires much investment and produces little income? A collection of silver spoons stamped with the family crest?
All of that can be haggled over, for the price varies from unclear to indiscernible. Further, haggling over it creates an entirely different situation for the owner. “Owner of local port providing 500 jobs to otherwise impoverished residents holds Christmas party despite government attempting to take the port from him” reads significantly better, and creates much more sympathy, than “Family With $50 Million Stock Market Fortune Flees to Virgin Islands, Fights to Not Fund NHS”.
Ridley understood this, as did Bendor. Further, much as Lee had studied McClellan and used his dim impression of the man’s aggressiveness to plan a sweeping counterattack that drove him from Richmond, they studied the tax bureaucracy and how slow it would move if weighed down with details…details that would also show “good faith” on the part of the family. In an inflationary environment, such time was a godsend.
All of this combined to help the Grosvenors and their loyal retainer defeat the tax service. Here’s how Lacey describes them doing so:
The first and obvious decision was to sell all Bend Or’s stocks and shares and to transfer that capital into land, for stocks and shares have a defined price on the day that a man dies. There can be no arguing about their value. But the real worth of a piece of land can be haggled over endlessly: short-term cash losses could be created by investing in sluggish farms and developments that would, on paper, be of relatively low value on the day of death - and, most important of all, there were the considerably reduced rates of death duty levied on agricultural land and on land given over to forestry.
So suddenly, in the late 1940s, obscure corners of the Grosvenors’ estates found themselves benefiting from the cash released by the sale of Bend Or’s stocks and shares. The Duke of Westminster appeared overcome with a tree-planting urge, putting down thousands of acres to spruce, larch and pine with a mystifying disregard for the advice of government forestry experts, whose approval meant qualifications for government grants: whether he got the grants or not, the Duke went on planting out his forests.
In 1950 he bought nearly 6000 acres in Shropshire belonging to the Bridgewater family, and in 1951 he diversified into rural industry. The little port of Kinlochbervie, standing on Grosvenor land in the northwest corner of Scotland (acquired through the family’s nineteenth-century connection with the Dukes of Sutherland) found itself the focus of an ambitious development plan.
Grosvenor money was poured into this obscure village and its surrounding area to reopen the harbour, build a cold store and create a transport system whereby fish that were landed one evening could be marketed next morning in Aberdeen and Glasgow.
It was, on the face of it, a quixotic gesture, for on the day Bend Or died in July 1953 there was no way his estate could immediately recoup the millions of pounds he had invested in agricultural land, forests and developments like Kinlochbervie. The money sunk into the silted-up harbour there could even have been presented to the valuers of the Inland Revenue as a loss.
But by the mid-1960s the little port had become a thriving and very profitable concern which it was possible to sell off to a local syndicate. So the Grosvenor estate did not just minimize death duties and make a long-term investment which proved most remunerative. They also got the credit for reviving a rundown rural community and for handing it back as a going concern to the locals.
So, while other families were utterly ruined by death taxes, the Grosvenors survived the highest tax period Britain has ever seen with their financial position more or less intact. They could only do so because they were willing to fight the system in a clever way, and had retainers on whom they could rely. They could put up the sort of challenge that stops the frictionless globalist system from destroying everything in its path.
Was this enough to save Britain? No. It was them fighting for their fortune. But they preserved it so that it could be used to continue fighting for Britain and against onerous tax and regulatory policies, as happened a few dukes later.
The Sixth Duke: Averting Financial Armageddon for Everyone
The sixth Duke of Westminster must have been thinking about family tradition and leadership when he inherited the title at the young age of thirty, for he did not spend his time frivolously in high society or with the jet set crowd, but rather set about using his financial inheritance—namely the ancestral lands near Chester—to develop a loyal following of retainers. This he did by staying involved in local charities, clubs, functions, and the like. Here’s how Lacey described it:
Gerald Grosvenor, 6th Duke of Westminster . . . has to find ways to steer his inherited wealth through it and round [the law], and he also has to earn the respect that is accorded more and more grudgingly these days to inherited status that is not royal.
Gerald Grosvenor has done that by reviving the traditional role played by the squires of Eaton - he is Chester’s own lord of the manor. Bend Or had no time for the locals. But his youthful cousin-once-removed has thrown himself into provincial life with all the vigour of a keen new prefect trying to rouse the house spirit. His diary is filled months ahead with the 200 or more local functions he attends every year, and the evening of Tuesday, 7 September 1982 finds him in a dusty church hall with the members of the local junior five-a-side soccer team.
The hall belongs to the Eaton estate and is leased to the youth club for £1 a year. Five little boys are standing nervously to attention in the middle of the room as their parents peek proudly from behind a door, and, with his hands behind his back, the thirty-year-old Duke strolls down the line in a dark chalk stripe suit trying to make them feel at ease. He presents them with new soccer jerseys provided by a local sports firm, delivers himself of a short speech and poses for the benefit of a cameraman from the local paper. Then the ceremony is over, and the little boys scamper off relieved, anxious to get their new jerseys dirty.
Not quite a private equity firm buying up youth sports leagues and charging obscene rates to participate in them!3
Indeed, Gerald seems to have actually cared about those around him, or at least was very good at pretending to for the good of the family. As he put it, describing his life and role and whether he resented the impositions upon his time, “Not at all. I believe in playing a positive role in my local community, and this is the role people seem to want me to play.” He added, “I could never join the jet set. I find that way of life brittle and superficial, quite lacking in satisfaction. This is what I enjoy.” True or not, it is what he spent his time doing. As Lacey noted, the Duke’s official “List of Commitments” consisted of “six sheets of tightly typed paper listing his patronage, chairmanship or membership of 186 organizations”.
And they were not just youth soccer leagues. He was also an officer in the militia, and so had a body of men in his community who were used to trusting him to give martial commands, much as his ancestors did. Lacey writes:
Gerald Grosvenor does dedicate a substantial portion of even his free time to worthy local activities. He spends at least one weekend a month with the Territorial Army, when he goes on map reading exercises, sleeping rough, for the best part of thirty-six hours as Captain Westminster in the Cheshire Squadron of the Queen’s Own Yeomanry, and straight after his month’s holiday shooting grouse at Abbeystead every year, he goes off for two weeks’ full-time manoeuvres with the ΤΑ.
In preparing the local militia for battle, Gerald Grosvenor is, of course, going right back to the origins of aristocracy. In 1983 he is carrying out precisely the same function in Cheshire as the Norman Hugh Lupus and the founding fathers of the Gros Veneurs…
As with Bendor’s pre-death reorganization, this mattered.
It mattered because, under the Leasehold Reform Act of 1967 (and subsequent Housing Acts), long-term tenants were given statutory powers to compulsorily purchase the freehold of their homes—a process known as leasehold enfranchisement. This was a particular problem for the Grosvenors, for the Grosvenor Estate owned over 300 acres of prime central London real estate across Mayfair and Belgravia. The legislation would strip that keystone of their wealth from them, and turn neighborhoods that they had kept nice and beautiful for generations into potentially blighted areas.
The estate set about fighting this legislation, doing so widely and prudently. First, they pretended to be mainly concerned with the public and the beauty of the area, fighting for an amendment that would maintain their aesthetic control over the neighborhood, preventing Erno Goldfinger types from ruining it. As Brian Masters records in The Dukes:
The Estate did not accept the inevitability of such a prospect. After protracted negotiations, they succeeded in having incorporated into the Act a Section (19) which allows for the landlord to retain the right to continue a management policy for the whole estate, while in no way interfering with the leaseholder’s right to buy the property... In the case of Belgravia, the High Court approved the granting of such a certificate in 1973.
That wasn’t the end of it. After setting about ensuring that the estate could maintain strict control over such matters as painting, architectural alterations, and usage even if a tenant bought the freehold—a move that limited the desirability of buying the real estate and made the public more accustomed to the idea of them remaining in charge of it, the estate set about fighting the legislation more broadly, something that was to the benefit of every property owner in the country, for it was a fight for property rights.
After all, the estate lost 100 properties over the course of the 1970s to the law, so it was an important subject to them, and to every other property owner who found himself disenfranchised by outright expropriation via legislation. Like the old Earl, they’d resist the centralized government’s demands and see what they could do about ensuring property rights. This the estate—ever conscious of optics—did through the language of the regime, namely “human rights”. As Lacey notes:
In 1982 the Grosvenor Estate took the British government to the European Court of Human Rights to dispute the Leasehold Reform Act which gives tenants the power, in certain circumstances, compulsorily to purchase their own homes, for the Duke believes that the rich have as much human right to their property as the poor...
That wasn’t all. At the same time as the duke used the human rights apparatus to try to shield property owners generally, he threw the sword on the table, so to speak. The man who was beloved by thousands upon thousands who relied upon his support for their leagues and charities, the man who commanded a local military unit composed largely of those whose families loved him, the man whose family had restored the fortunes of many a forgotten area…suggested he might have to leave the country due to the attack on his rights, and take his money with him. Indeed, he let it be known that "...plans exist to shift him and his fortune offshore 'at the flick of a switch' if ever its preservation in Britain were to appear impossible."
A fortune worth hundreds of millions of pounds was no small thing in those days, particularly given the continual financial problems of the British government. It was struggling along, looking weak, and Thatcher was trying to show she was a friend of freedom so that America would help her in the Falklands War. She couldn’t be seen as acting like a communist with expropriation-enabling legislation at home just years after handing Rhodesia to Mugabe, particularly with Reagan in the White House and treating some of her initial requests for help with scorn…
Add in the financial upheaval and general misery in the country, her crackdown on the coal miners, and the idea of perhaps tens of thousands thrown out of work or losing their charities because she had chased a beloved man out of the country for no reason other than his family’s ancient connection to the land, and the fact that there was a military unit loyal to him was a very real thing. Mountbatten’s coup attempt might have succeeded a few years earlier, after all, and Gerald was better liked than Mountbatten…
The totality of his threats, and nature of his influence, was not good for Thatcher. Though she eventually defeated the human rights challenge after much embarrassment, she found herself on losing ground with the lords and had to end the Capital Transfer Tax, the real threat to the estate.4 This was of tremendous benefit to every property owner in the country, as it made it possible to somewhat survive death taxes again, and the Leasehold Act remained full of loopholes. Meanwhile, the Grosvenors, having bought themselves time, converted the Mayfair and Belgravia “houses” into networks of apartments that looked like houses, making the law inapplicable, for it only applied to houses.
A total victory it was not, but nor had the earl’s victory against Edward I been total. It was, rather, a limited victory that showed the government could not do anything it wanted, as there would be resistance to its tyrannical usurpations. If nothing else, there would be immense friction. More realistically, the regime would suffer defeats as the friction turned into it facing impossible choices and difficult battles.
Back to Modernity
All that is well and good, but why does it remain relevant?
Because this is the path to resisting what Thiel warned of. At worst, that is the Antichrist. Less catastrophically, perhaps, it is a global nanny state that smothers its victims in the name of peace and safety.
No one is loyal to the tech founders. Bill Gates, the Indian in charge of Google, the Russian-named guy that left Google and now is whining about taxes in California imposed by Democrats he has long supported, and all the others could be thrown off the Tarpeian Rock tomorrow, and it is unlikely anyone would shed a single tear. They are weird and unlikeable people whose behavior has been poor, whose time horizons are short, and whose characters are obviously lacking. Courage they have not, nor do they have retainers who are anything but opportunistic mercenaries. This has real consequences.
Could Bill Gates get his current legal team to work for him for more than a moment if the government froze his assets, and victory in the case looked very unlikely? Probably not. Could Mark Zuckerberg? Probably not. There are many who want something from them, but few to none who much like them and are loyal to them. As plutocratic elites rather than aristocrats, they haven’t invested in the sort of relationships that matter when on the wrong side of the state apparatus.
But one can imagine George Ridley sticking by the Grosvenors even if the estate faced dark days. One can imagine the earl’s knights following him to London to confront Edward I against all odds. Erik Prince has men all over the world on whom he can rely even in dismal situations, as became clear when Hillary Clinton’s State Department mugged him and destroyed Blackwater out of pique.
Elon Musk could use SpaceX to put Rods from God in the sky and drop them anywhere on Earth. He probably doesn’t want to do that, but he always could. Such is what his close personal control over SpaceX, rather than just being a 10% holder of SpaceX stock, grants him. He is a man who can do things. More than Grok, Tesla, or anything else, that unspoken threat gives him a certain ability to negotiate that even his peers don’t have. Raising his son to be the man who can control such an organization and use it for similar purposes would make it even more effective, as would his being part of an entire class of men who can pose such threats and challenges to the apparatus. Their doing so requires more than just money. It requires power, which is dependent on real ownership rather than abstracted ownership, and it requires a sense of duty, the attitude expressed by the duke that he ought be part of his community and help better it.
Elon is different many of the others because he still controls real companies that do real things that matter. Facebook is controlled by Zuckerberg, but utterly reliant on networks of state permission slips to be anything other than a blocked website. Over the long term, SpaceX needs permission theoretically, but who really could stop Elon from putting tungsten rods in space? Who could stop him from wreaking havoc by shutting down Teslas with a remote update? Hopefully he does not do those things, but he could fight back effectively if attacked because he exercises personal control over entities that can shape the world in a tangible way.
That’s only so useful when it is just one man, but is incredibly useful when part of a class. Were it just the one earl, Edward could have crushed him. Fighting all the old Norman barons was a decidedly less appetizing prospect, so he chose not to.
Such is why men of Elon and the earl’s mold, when part of a class, can throw up challenges to globalist tyranny that plutocrats cannot. They have less fear of assets being frozen than stock owners—things are different when wealth is measured in acres, relationships, and personally held and personally managed companies, even if there are regulatory assaults upon them—and have the knowledge that there are men on whom they can rely to help them fight. As the old earl did.
That is what creates the friction points that slow this down. Thiel expressed his worry of an all-enveloping, frictionless global surveillance state run by AI-enabled bureaucracies, institutions, foundations, and the like, headed by the sort of man who could master such a beast and use it to leave his dismal mark. That is a real threat to Western man’s flourishing and liberty, whether or not the Antichrist comes. The way to fight it is to provide the little, castle-like redoubts that serve as friction points, bastions of resistance to that centralized tyranny. This is what Great Houses once were. It is what they could be again.
Read my thoughts on building the sort of class that matters here:
As Leslie Fields records in Bendor: The Golden Duke of Westminster, he wrote, as a young man:
“I speak next Saturday in our club; the question to be debated is “are the Gracchi to be considered true patriots?” I think they are…”
Seems to me that Thiel's description of the Antichrist could apply to him. After all, he's one of the people who have been creating the system he says we should fear.